Press Release

Mitchell-Innes & Nash is pleased to present its third solo show of Brooklyn painter Chris Martin. The exhibition will feature a group of new paintings, including several from a new series painted on newspaper grids.

Chris Martin was born in 1954 and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. His current solo exhibition "Staring into the Sun" at the Kunsthalle Dusseldorf, on view through January 15, is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue. Martin’s first solo museum show took place in 2011 at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. He has been featured in notable survey shows including “Abstract America” at the Saatchi Gallery in London, “Painting as Fact – Fact as Fiction” at de Pury and Luxembourg, Zurich, and “The Painted World” at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, New York. His work is in public collections including the Corcoran Gallery; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the Denver Art Museum. He is represented by Mitchell-Innes & Nash.

Martin is a firm believer in the beauty and surprise of chance operations, in knowing and not being sure of what he is doing at any given moment. His painting materials have included foam insulation, roof cement, glitter, pom-poms, felt, bread, photographs, and newspaper clippings, record albums, and “smoke on canvas,” while he has painted on vinyl, bath towels, aluminum foil, and burlap… His approach is at the same time serious, playful, and playfully serious. …

Martin’s vehicle is unquestionably painting, its history and those he identifies with as its key spiritual practitioners, and in quoting from them he is enfolding their visual language with his own, simultaneously conversing with these artists and being inside of his own head. In this sense, painting is equally a means for him to lose and find himself, over and over again.

Excerpted from “Chris Martin: In the Mind’s Eye” by Bob Nickas; Chris Martin: Staring at the Sun, published by the Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2011